A Study On The Translation Of Children’s Picture Book

Picture books for children, as an important part of children’s literature, play a vital role in promoting the development of children’s psychology, language competence, cognitive ability and creativity. Translation of picture books for children has become a trend recently. Scholars focus on the study of picture books themselves and show great concern for their function in children education, but theoretical research on this field has not been paid due attention. The truth is that the study of translated picture books for children will definitely provide some guidance for our original picture book creation. Therefore, this paper tries to study the current state of children’s picture book translation, based on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and researches on children’s language development.The paper includes six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction part, which introduces the research object, purposes and questions. The research object is the translations of the100picture books suggested by National Education Association; the research purposes are illustrated from three aspects:first, it is to discuss the reasons why the translators choose those techniques and to list the features of translated picture books in line with Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory; second, it is to prove the four developmental stages in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development by analyzing the reasons why Guess How Much I Love You gained so much popularity; third, it is to find the gap between picture books at home and those abroad by making a contrast between them, thus providing guidance for the picture book creation at home. The second one is literature review, which illustrates the definition, history and type of picture books, describes the major children’s picture book publishers at home and the important translations of children’s picture books, and introduces the current state of picture book research at home and abroad. Chapter three is theoretical framework, illustrating Piaget’s theory of cognitive development to provide theoretical foundation for the study in the next Chapter. This chapter mainly talks about the characteristics of cognitive abilities at each stage and their developmental changes. Chapter four is the main body of the whole paper, summarizing the characteristics of children’s picture book translation by analyzing the translations in line with the theories in Chapter three. First it analyses the language features of picture books abroad, including dynamic beauty, conciseness, sense of rhyme, and interestingness. Second, it summarizes the basic features of translated picture books, that is, translating the title of picture books in a skillful way, achieving interplay of words with pictures, maintaining linguistic features, and retaining stylistic features. Finally, based on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and the basic features of picture books, it summarizes the ways to achieve successful translations of picture books. Chapter five is case study, choosing Guess How Much I Love You, which is a world classic, with sales of over15million copies all over the world. It makes a contrast between the original text and the translated text and summarizes the translation features. It also illustrates the reasons why this picture book gains so much popularity in China to prove Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. The last chapter makes a summary of the whole study, points out the shortcomings of picture book creation at home and provides some reasonable suggestions.